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July 28, 2008

Bigger Problems

by Sam Savage

I read with disbelief that our school officials and the general public are unaware how to improve our high-school dropout rate.

Somehow, they have forgotten that America is a highly competitive society. This means that our people are not rewarded for helping each other, but for doing better than their neighbors, peers and, of course, classmates. The grading system on a curve is definitive proof of success and failure on a comparative basis.

As parents, we learned that the school's honor classes have a maximum five grade points for an A. We fought the school districts in Pomona, Upland and the Chaffey Joint Union High School Districts to allow our children to take the most demanding classes and achieve higher grade-point averages. Our children have degrees from UC Irvine, and our grandchildren are attending Drexel, UC Riverside and Princeton, among other colleges and universities.

The lower classes are pipelined to America's jails and militaries. This provides great employment opportunities for the police forces and prison guards. Because the upper class will not fight for America, the lower classes and the less educated are recruited to fight America's wars. The American ruling classes have no true desire to demand a solution to the education problems of the lower classes. Our capitalistic system is not one that seeks others to truly compete with the upper-class Americans for the American dream of education and wealth.

To understand the importance of wealth, a person need only look at the high cost of earning a master's degree from a highly respected university.